Forests of the Night Page 4

  “Cozy,” Trev said, covering his nose with his sleeve. “We could summer here.”

  Jackson gestured to the thick beams that ran along the ceiling. “He must have hung himself there.”

  Sam pointed the light to the rafters. They startled a small bird. It flapped its wings, but didn’t fly away. “I don’t know. I’m just not feeling it.” Spider webs caught the light, and Jackson ducked lower to avoid them.

  “Sorry.” Jackson mumbled. She shouldn’t have been this disappointed. Did he actually want to find a murderous ghost? “I thought it was worth a look.”

  “No prob.” Sam smiled at Jackson. “I needed an excuse to practice a stick anyway.”

  “That’s what she said,” Trev chimed in.

  Sam groaned. “Yes. I’m a girl. And that is what I said.”

  Trev grabbed the flashlight out of Sam’s hands. He held it up under his chin. “I vant to suck your bluuud!” He wasn’t holding it right, so the beam of light went right into Sam’s eyes.

  “Idiot,” Sam hissed. She turned and left the boathouse. Jackson could never tell when Sam was going to laugh at something her brother did or get all bitchy about it. She kind of scared the shit out of him most of the time.

  Jackson went after her, catching up to her by the edge of the water. “So, what next?”

  Sam picked up a twig and threw it into the lake. “How exactly does this ghost kill people? In the story?”

  “Well, like I said, everyone drowned.” After that first young couple died, three more people drowned in the lake. The drownings happened years apart and could easily have been accidents. One man was fishing by himself. When he didn’t come to work the next day, a friend came out to the lake to check on him. He was found floating in the lake beside his boat, along with several empty beer cans. The authorities thought it was pretty obvious how the man died—drinking while operating a motor vehicle.

  The two most recent deaths were another young couple. A woman and her boyfriend were visiting the area from Portland. Again, it was a case of drowning with no signs of a struggle—nothing under the fingernails, no defensive wounds on the arms. Nothing to suggest that it wasn’t just a terrible accident.

  “Well, I say we lure the fucker out.” Sam took off her raincoat and flung it at her brother who was still standing in the boathouse out of the rain. Trev didn’t make a move to catch it and the coat fell into the lakeside muck. Sam rolled her eyes at her brother.

  Then she took off her shirt.

  Jackson swallowed and looked down at his feet. “What are you . . . ?”

  “It’s just a swimsuit.” She slipped off her shoes, shimmied out of her jeans, and stood at the lake’s edge in a very sporty blue-and-white two-piece. The top resembled a sports bra and the bottoms looked like tight shorts. She reminded Jackson of one of those Olympic beach volleyball players.

  “Let’s see if he takes the bait,” Sam said. Then, before Jackson really had time to process anything beyond Sam taking off her shirt, she ran into the water. She shrieked at the cold and laughed as she sucked in her breath.

  “What the fuck?!” Trev shouted after picking up her raincoat. “You know I was joking earlier? About you swimming? I know, it’s kind of hard to tell when I’m joking since I’m usually so very serious.”

  “Water’s great!” Sam called back to them. She was waist-deep, with her arms crossed over her chest. It had to be freezing. Sam was kind of far away to really tell, but Jackson thought her lips were turning purple.

  Jackson had often imagined Sam taking off her clothes, but it had never involved her splashing around in a slimy, greenish lake that was full of duck shit.

  “Don’t get swimmer’s itch!” Trev yelled, while his sister called out, “Come on in!”

  Jackson’s disappointment at not finding the ghost quickly vanished as he took off his shirt and shoes and then splashed his way to Sam.

  “Shit, fuck!” Jackson yelped. The cold water hit him like a punch to the gut, sucking the breath out of him. But Sam was beautiful, even in the murky water. Some kind of water-weed was caught in her hair and she looked like a mermaid. The kind that eats people.

  Trev had stepped out of the boathouse and was holding Sam’s coat above his head like a cape. “You’re both going to catch pneumonia and die, and then your ghosts are going to haunt me,” he said. “I’ll be the only one who can see you, but I’ll ignore you. How’ll you like that? It’ll be like an episode of the fucking Twilight Zone.”

  “Dom and Macy could see us!” Jackson called back.

  “But they’ll be too busy doin’ it like rabbits to care,” Trev replied.

  Jackson didn’t really know what was going on with Dom and Macy. They were always looking at each other with those stupid googly eyes, and it was really annoying. Dom hardly knew Macy, but he was always talking to her in this hushed voice like they were the only two people in the room. But as far as Jackson knew, nothing had really happened. Even if Macy didn’t want to tell him, Claire would probably have let him know whether he asked her or not. Claire didn’t really have a filter.

  Jackson dove under the freezing water, instantly regretting it as the lake water went up his nose. He sputtered back to the surface and looked to see if Sam noticed him flailing around like an idiot. She wasn’t there.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Sam?” Jackson called out. “Sam?”

  “Fuck!” Trev threw down his sister’s coat and started wading into the water. He didn’t even stop to take off his shoes. “Do you see her?”

  Jackson swung around wildly. They had gone out deeper before she vanished, and the water was about up to his chest . . . which meant that it was probably up to Sam’s chin. She was pretty tall for a girl, but not as tall as him. “I can’t see her. I can’t . . . ” Then Jackson saw some strands of red hair floating near the surface like algae. “There!” He and Trev swam towards her. Trev, it turned out, was the better swimmer. He glided through the water like a fucking otter and then dove down. Trev must have been trying to pull his sister up, but it looked like she was caught on something. There was thrashing beneath the surface of the lake and it reminded Jackson of those nature videos of alligators, where they catch their prey in the water and spin and spin until they drown the victim.

  “I see him,” Trev gasped when he came up to take a breath. “Fucker has her feet. I’m going back down.” He disappeared with another splash.

  Jackson stood perfectly still in the disgusting water, his feet sinking slightly into the grainy muck. His nose still hurt from snorting in water and he had no idea what to do. He waited for three heartbeats for the twins to come back to the surface. But they were just shadows struggling beneath the water.

  It was pouring by then, and the rain pocked the surface of the lake. Taking a deep breath, Jackson dove back under. He made himself open his eyes. They stung and he could barely see through the silt that Trev and Sam were churning up. He was probably going to get eye herpes or something from this shit. Jackson could just make out Sam’s bare arms and legs and he swam towards them. Trev had his hands under Sam’s armpits and was trying to pull her away from whatever had her legs. Sam was kicking and struggling, her face covered by a cloud of her long red hair.

  Jackson swam for Sam’s feet. He wished he had a harpoon or a trident like Ariel’s dad in The Little Mermaid. That’s who Sam looked like—Ariel. Not that it mattered right now. What he needed was something pointy, like a long stick, so he could stab the ghost (that he couldn’t even fucking see) from a safe distance. But all he had were his hands. What would Macy do? Several times she had tried to explain to Jackson how she got rid of ghosts. Macy said that she let her mind take hold of them. She could feel what held them together, what kept them—their bodies?—from flying into a million little pieces. Then she pulled them apart. It made no fucking sense to Jackson, but he needed to try something.

  Jackson put his hands on Sam’s jerking legs. They were slimy and kept slipping from his grip. He thought that i
f the ghost had a hold of Sam’s legs, then he could find the ghost by running his hand down to her feet. It wasn’t a good plan, but Jackson had no other ideas at the moment. Trev had gone up for another breath and Jackson could hear the muted sound of him yelling.

  Sam had stopped kicking and seemed to float limply. Trev was still tugging on her arms, but her legs were clearly being pulled down towards the mucky bottom. Jackson tried grabbing at the area beneath Sam, but he only felt water and stringy weeds. Soon he would need to take a breath. He could feel his lungs aching even as his teeth chattered from the cold. He tried pulling on Sam’s legs himself, but she was stuck fast. Jackson stood up, pushing his face out of the water and sucking in air. Trev had his head above the water, still pulling on his sister.

  “Do you see him?” Jackson gasped, his mouth barely working.

  “Fucker’s down there. I’m not strong enough. We need Dom.” Jackson could barely understand Trev through his chattering teeth. Trev’s wet hair was plastered to his forehead, and his lips looked blue. Jackson had never seen Trevor Moss like this—with eyes wide and terrified.

  “Shit,” Jackson said, then took another deep breath. He dove down again and nearly poked his eye out on an algae-covered branch. Perfect! He broke off the sharp end of the branch, cutting his palm in the process. It stung, but he tried to ignore the pain and focus on what he held in his hands. Now he had a foot-long, stabby . . . thing. A spear.

  The water around his face clouded even more with his own blood and he could feel vomit coming up his nose. Jackson stared at Sam’s limp feet. He held his stinging, twitching eyes open, willing himself to see something—anything. He tried to be Macy, to think with her brain. What would she see?

  Finally, he saw—not a person exactly—but a shimmery, greenish smudge. It could have been anything, maybe the light from the sun finally breaking through the rain clouds, or just a patch of different colored algae. But it wasn’t. It was Jackson’s smudge. His ghost.

  Jackson put his hand on Sam’s cold, slippery ankle and stabbed the water just below her foot. He imagined that he was popping a balloon and all the air was going to shoot out in a jet of bubbles. He imagined a great white shark tearing through a school of fish, making them scatter.

  Jackson thought he heard a scream, only it didn’t sound muffled by the water. It was close and angry. It sounded like a man. Then Sam’s foot slipped through his hand. Jackson resurfaced to find Trev holding Sam against his chest, swimming them both to shore.

  Sam had been under the water for two minutes and fifty-eight seconds. It had felt like an hour to Jackson, but Trev had started counting the moment his sister’s head vanished beneath the lake. He told this to Jackson on the drive home while Sam lay in the backseat with her head on Trev’s lap, shivering and wrapped in the extra blankets that Dom kept in the trunk of his car.

  When Trev first pulled his sister onto the shore, Sam wasn’t breathing. Jackson was about to start CPR—he wasn’t certified or anything, but he had seen plenty of movies and thought he knew the basics—when Trev pushed him aside. Trev turned Sam onto her side and pounded on her back until lake water poured out of her mouth and nose. She coughed and coughed, curling around herself. Jackson would never have said it out loud, but with greenish slime sticking to her chin, Sam looked like something that had already started to decompose.

  “You stupid . . . ” Trev murmured, lying down and wrapping himself around her. “Stupid, fucking . . . ”

  Sam coughed some more, hacking and spitting out more lake muck. Then she grinned a freaky, teeth-chattering grin. “Did it work?”

  “What?” Jackson was on his hands and knees in front her, ready to do something—anything—if she needed him.

  “Did you get him?” Sam’s freckles stood out on her bloodless face. She tried to lift a hand, probably to brush her hair out of her eyes, but Trev had pinned her arms to her side in his embrace. Jackson moved the strand of hair for her.

  “Yeah. I think so.” Jackson felt himself grin too, though his face was almost too numb to feel it.

  Trev glared at him. “Your fucking ghost.” With Trev’s face mostly buried in the back of Sam’s neck, Jackson could barely hear him. “You two . . . I make the plans from now on. Stupid . . . fucking . . . ”

  Sam coughed, spit out more lake water, then she struggled against her brother until he helped her sit up. “So,” Sam said between coughs. “When are we . . . doing this . . . again?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After Macy left Dom’s house she went straight to the Door. Macy didn’t really plan it, she just started walking. It wasn’t just Nick’s funeral, it was his birthday. He would have been nineteen today and he probably would have been at college. She wouldn’t have even seen him today anyway if he was still alive. Nick didn’t like to talk on the phone, but she still could have called him and sung the happy birthday song in the little chipmunk voice that she always did to make him laugh. The University of Washington wasn’t that far—she and her parents might have taken the ferry to Seattle for the day and gone out to dinner with Nick. They could have gotten Indian food because that was Nick’s favorite, and Macy would have ordered the garlic naan and a big mug of chai with her dinner.

  Or she and all her friends might be dead. Because if Nick hadn’t died, Macy wouldn’t be able to see ghosts. She wouldn’t have been able to stop Lorna from burning down the school. Maybe Dom could have done it—but he never actually saw the ghost that started the fires. Macy often wondered about that—why she was the only one who could see the man in the goggles.

  Macy could get to the Door from the school grounds, but she preferred to go a few blocks past the school and take a little path through the woods. That way you didn’t have to climb over the fence. She wasn’t the only one who walked around in the woods behind the school. She was always finding beer bottles and old crumpled packs of cigarettes. There were lots of little paths back there and you could even cut through the woods and take a trail down to the beach below. It was quite steep, though, and wasn’t really an official trail. It looked pretty dangerous. Once Macy had taken the wrong path back there and found an old La-Z-Boy recliner that someone had hauled into the woods. It was soaked from the rain and had a big rip along the headrest. Macy wasn’t sure if this was an alternative to hauling it to the dump or if someone actually sat in it from time to time.

  It only took a few minutes from the road using one of the paths. She had been there so many times that her feet knew the steps by heart. When she got to the Door, Macy stopped and crouched down among the blackberry vines. They caught on her tights, tearing more long runs in the black fabric. They were ruined anyway, so what the hell. Rain dripped off the edge of her hood and splattered onto her knee. She shivered, watching the light from the Door throb and flicker. It was almost beautiful, but it was also terrible, like a TV set to the wrong ratio or color.

  Almost every single day since the Door opened, Macy had come here and watched the ghosts come through. At first they came out quickly—shadows that seemed to stretch their way out of the Door like those blobs in a lava lamp. They would press against the Door as if there was some kind of barrier, and the pulsing light would bulge and bend outward until they broke through. It was almost like the ghosts were being born. That’s what Macy tried to explain to Jackson because he couldn’t see it the way she could. He said that if he squinted and looked out of the corner of his eye he could see a glimmer. That was all.

  Once a ghost broke free it tended to do one of several things. Some of them ran—fleeing through trees and brambles and off into the distance. Andrea’s ghost had probably been one of the runners. Other ghosts just vanished. Macy wondered where they went. Could ghosts wish themselves back to the houses they had lived in when they were alive or to a favorite coffee shop? Or maybe it wasn’t a place. Perhaps they wished themselves close to the one they loved when they were alive.

  Or maybe they simply dissolved like the burned lunch lady. When she realized she was dead,
it looked like she had just faded away. Dom said she wasn’t one of the ghosts that lingered, but where did she go? Did the ghosts who vanished right after they died just go to the other side of the Door? Could they still come back?

  Some ghosts stopped once they came through the door. They looked around with bewildered expressions, like sleepwalkers who had just awoken and found themselves far from their beds. Macy took care of these ghosts. It wasn’t hard—these ghosts all felt like echoes, just wisps that scattered as soon as Macy imagined a dry leaf crumbling in her hand, or a sandcastle melting in the waves.

  Today, as she stared into the glow of the Door and watched it waver and billow like a sheet caught in the wind, Macy wondered if it went the other way. Could a living person go through the Door? What would happen? Would you become a ghost yourself? This wasn’t a new thought. Macy wondered about this every time she came here and watched the Door. Could you actually go into that mysterious place? But this time, as she thought about what lay on the other side of the Door, Macy decided to try something. She reached into her pocket and took out a quarter. She pressed her thumb against the dead president’s face and ran her fingernail along the edge. Then she threw it at the door.

  Light rippled as the quarter passed through and the Door seemed to bend inward. There was a strange smell, like burning plastic or hair. Then the coin was gone. Macy got up and looked on the other side of the Door, but realized that even had the quarter passed through to the other side and back out into the woods, it would be nearly impossible to find in the dead leaves and blackberry vines. And what if she did find a quarter? How could she know for sure that it was her quarter?

  “Fuck.” Macy whispered the word, even though there was no one around to hear her. She would have to plan this out a little better next time she tried to test the Door. If there was a next time.